One cannot but welcome Mr. Drozdov’s initiative in raising,
in his pamphlet, an extremely interesting and important question. The
author has taken the figures of the daily wages (expressed in terms both of
money and of grain), the rye crop yield on private landlord fields during
1902–04, and the annual figures for the period 1905–10, and compared
these data for different parts of European Russia.

The author found the biggest pay rises for 1905 in the south-western
region (a ten per cent rise compared with 1902–04). The average increase
for Russia was 1.2 per cent in 1905, and 12.5 per cent in 1906. From this
the author draws the conclusion that wages rose most in regions in which
agricultural capitalism is most developed, and the strike form of struggle
(as distinct from what is known as the “riot and wreck” form) is most
widespread. Strictly speaking, these figures are inadequate to support this
conclusion. For example, the second highest rise in wages occurred in 1905
in the Urals region (a rise of 9.68 per cent, as against 10.35 per cent in
the south-western region). If we take average wages for the whole
of the post-revolutionary period, i. e., 1905–10, we shall get an index
number of 110.3 (taking 1902–04 at 100) in the south-western region, and
121.7 in the Urals. The author, as it were, makes an “exception” for the
Urals, on the basis of my book The Development of Capitalism. But
in that book I made an exception for the Urals in studying workers’ mass
migration, not the level of wages in
general.[1]
The author’s reference
to my book, therefore, is wrong. Nor can his reference to the very small
percentage of private landlord farming in the
Urals[2]
be regarded as satisfactory. The author should have taken the more detailed
gubernia figures and compared the rise in wages with the figures showing
the relative strength of the agrarian movement in general, and of
its strike form, “riot and wreck” form, and so on.

On the whole, the money wages of agricultural labourers throughout
Russia rose most between 1905 and 1906. Taking the wages of
1902–04 at 100, the index number for 1905 and 1906 will be 101.2 and 112.5
respectively. The index numbers for the ensuing four years are: 114.2,
113.1, 118.4 and 119.6. It is clear that with the general rise in
money wages as a result of the revolution, we see the direct and
predominating influence of the struggle of 1905–06.

Referring our readers to Mr. Drozdov’s excellent pamphlet for the
details, we shall observe here that the author has no grounds whatever for
describing as “manifestly impracticable” those demands of the peasants
which virtually amounted to “smoking out the landlords” (p. 30). Equally
groundless and unreasoned is his statement that in the “riot and wreck”
regions the “struggle was waged for equalised land tenure, and, in
general, for other equally petty-bourgeois, utopian demands”
(p. 38). Firstly, the peasants fought, not only for land tenure, but for
landownership (“smoking out”); secondly, they fought, not for equalised
tenure, hut for the transfer to them of the landed estates—that is
something entirely different. Thirdly, what was and remains utopian is the
subjective hopes (and “theories”) of the Narodniks in
the matter of “equality”, “socialisation”, “taking the land out of
commercial circulation”, and similar nonsense; but there was nothing
“utopian” in the petty-bourgeois masses “smoking out” the
feudalists. The author con fuses the objective historical significance of
the peasants’ struggle for land—a struggle that was progressive-bourgeois
and radical-bourgeois—with the subjective theories and hopes of the
Narodniks, which were, and still are, utopian
and reactionary. Such confusion is profoundly erroneous, undialectical and
unhistorical.

Comparing the averages for 1891–1900 with those for 1901–10, the
author draws the general conclusion that daily money wages all
over Russia rose by 25.5 per cent, while real wages, expressed in
terms of grain, rose only by 3.9 per cent, i. e., underwent hardly
any change at all. We would remark that, arranged to reflect money-wage
rises during the above-mentioned decades, the order of the various regions
is as follows: Lithuania 39 per cent, the Volga area 33 per cent, the Urals
30 per cent, the Ukraine 28 per cent, the central agricultural region 26
per cent, etc.

In conclusion, the author compares the rise in agricultural labourers’
wages during the past two decades (1891–1900 and 1901–10) with the rise
in ground-rent. It appears that for the whole of Russia, average wages rose
from 52.2 kopeks per day to 66.3 kopeks, i.e., by 27 per cent. However, the
price of land—it is well known that the price of land is capitalised
rent—rose from 69.1 rubles per dessiatine to 132.4 rubles, that
is, by 91 per cent. In other words, wages rose by one-fourth, while
ground-rent almost doubled!

“And this circumstance,” the author rightly concludes, “signifies
only one thing, namely: the deterioration in the relative standard of
living of the agricultural labourers in Russia, with a simultaneous
relative rise in the standard of living of the landowning class.... The
social gulf between the landlord class and the class of wage-labourers is
steadily widening.”

Notes

[2]In this connection the author puts the northern region on a par with
the Urals. But in the northern region, wages in 1905 dropped by six
per cent, and in 1906 showed only an eight per cent rise. —Lenin